As network connectivity has continued its explosive growth, content providers are using the World Wide Web (the “Web”) to provide access to their multimedia content (eg. images, video, audio, etc.). Unlike textual content, such as HTML pages, multimedia content is not directly accessible to standard Web search engines. These search engines can examine sites on the Web and extract information about the textual content of those sites. Such information is typically termed “metadata” which is data that describes or catalogues aspects of other data. The extracted information (metadata) can then provide users with access to that content using their customised metadata databases.
In the case of multimedia, content providers or distributors typically store information about the multimedia items to which they have access in metadata databases. The content providers then enable access to these databases by providing a search engine that users or customers can access from a Web site, typically the content provider/distributor's own Web site. Customers wanting to view, or maybe purchase, content that a content provider/distributor has access to, can visit the Web site and use the search engine to search the content provider/distributor's metadata database. Typically the metadata database contains visual identifiers of the content (eg. thumbnails, video abstracts, audio previews, etc) as part of the metadata. The user can then make decisions about which item(s) they may wish to purchase/use based on the metadata that is returned from their searches.
In many cases the multimedia content is digital and on-line, and potential customers can purchase the rights to use or purchase a copy of the desired multimedia item from the content provider/distributor's Web site. More often than not, this transaction is completed on the Web site and the potential customer can directly download their newly acquired content. However this model of providing access to multimedia content does not require that the content is on-line. For example, a potential customer might be able to purchase the rights to use, or a copy, of the desired content from the Web site but the content may be delivered to the potential customer by non-electronic means (ie. the postal system). Another variation is that the potential customer may be redirected from a distributor's site to the actual content provider in order to purchase and acquire a copy of the desired content. Other variations include the potential customer being directed to a physical location to purchase the content and being posted books containing the metadata associated with items to be purchased.
In all the abovementioned situations, the potential customer can only gain access to the content to which each content provider/distributor has access. If the potential customer wanted to perform a search across several different content providers/distributors, the potential customer would have to visit the Web site and use the search engine of each of the different content providers/distributors. Such actions are often time consuming and annoying because the potential customer must use a different search engine interface each time.
These problems have encouraged the development of very large metadata databases on the Web where a content distributor either purchases the rights to content or simply acts as a distributor for smaller content providers. Examples of such are the large image databases of Getty and Corbus. This approach has its own problems. Firstly, the approach does not scale because as the databases become very large, the search time increases. Further, typically all the metadata has to be structured in a similar fashion in order to contain the same metadata keys. However, such is not always desirable as different metadata may be more appropriate depending on the targeted use of the content. For example, images captured for geological purposes would require different metadata that those captured for holiday brochures. Thirdly, smaller content providers have no way to directly sell their content (ie. they are effectively forced to use the larger distributors).
It is an object of the present invention to ameliorate one or more disadvantages of the prior art.